Saturday, September 6, 2014

Remove the Extra Page After Tables in MS Word

You've spent an hour or more creating and perfecting your document. It is beautiful, a work of art one might say. (Yes, you know who you are. You get excited about your new word documents. Don't worry, no judgement here!) It is perfect, except for one thing - you can't get rid of that pesky extra page! You have a beautifully crafted table at the bottom of your document and that sneaky extra page just won't go away even though you have deleted everything after the table - twice. The cursor simply blinks at the top of the extra page, silently mocking you. No fear, help is here! One quick thing will solve it - every single time.

Now you have your table at the bottom of your page, followed by the pesky extra page. Make sure you have deleted everything after the table.

Make sure your cursor is at the top of the empty page and then change the font to size 1. You'll need to be sure you are on the "Home" tab of the tool bar across the top. Click in the font size box and change it to one. The drop down menu won't have the option for 1, so you can just highlight the number already in the box and type the number 1.

Once you type the 1, hit enter. Ta da! Empty page eliminated! If you look closely you can see your tiny font size one cursor at the very bottom of the page.

Another trick that I've seen work at times, is to change what is called the "text wrapping" setting for your table. This changes how the text on the rest of the page interacts with your table. To do this, click on your table so that the little cross with arrows icon shows up at the top left corner of the table.

Then right click on it to bring up some menu options.

Choose "Table Properties".

Look for the "Text wrapping" option. It should be there on the first page, but if it isn't, make sure you are on the "Table" tab. Change it to "Around" instead of none. Click "OK".

That may fix it as well. However, this can possibly mess up your beautifully crafted formatting on the rest of the page, depending on what is in your document. It might not, but keep an eye out for other changes on your document if you decide to go this route instead of the font change.

Thanks for stopping in at TeachingTechNix! I hope your days of singing the "Extra-Page" blues are over. Stop in again soon for some more handy tech tips.